For over three decades, Allan N. Schore has authored numerous volumes, chapters, and articles on regulation theory, a biopsychosocial model of the development, psychopathogenesis, and treatment of the implicit subjective self. The theory is grounded in the integration of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, and it is now being used by both clinicians to update psychotherapeutic models and by researchers to generate research. First published in 1994, this pioneering volume represented the inaugural expression of his interdisciplinary model, and has since been hailed by a number of scientific and clinical disciplines as a groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting work.
This volume appeared at a time when the problem of emotion, ignored for most of the last century, was finally beginning to be addressed by science, including the emergent field of affective neuroscience. After a century of the dominance of the verbal left brain, it presented a detailed characterization of the early developing right brain and it unique social, emotional, and survival functions, not only in infancy but across all later stages of the human life span. It also offered a scientifically testable and clinical relevant model of the development of the human unconscious mind.
Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self acts as a keystone and foundation for all of Schore’s later writings, as every subsequent book, article, and chapter that followed represented expansions of this seminal work.
Allan Schore reveals himself as a polymath, the depth and breadth of whose reading, bringing together neurobiology, developmental neurochemistry, behavioral neurology, evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, developmental psychoanalysis and infant psychiatry is staggering. This is a superb integrative work, and excellent source book for psychiatrists wishing to locate their work within the much broader study of the mind. It might also form the basis of what could be an enormously creative dialogue between neurobiology and psychoanalysis.
British Journal of Psychiatry
…Allan Schore’s… work is leading to an integrated evidence-based dynamic theory of human development that will engender a rapprochement between psychiatry and neural sciences.
American Journal of Psychiatry
Schore’s … model explicates in exemplary detail the precise mechanisms by which the infant brain might internalize and structuralize the affect-regulating functions of the mother, in circumscribed neural tissues, at specifiable points in its epigenetic history … I unreservedly recommend this uniquely informative book to psychoanalytic readers.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
In this extensively researched (over 2,300 references!) and cogently argued text, Allan N. schore provides a major contribution to the study of the relationship between the neurological processes and structures of the brain and the socioaffective and object representational phenomena that we generally associate with the mind. Schore’s approach is an outstanding example of the genre of studies seeking to demonstrate neurological isomorphisms for the kind of mental or psychic states that have been postulated by psychoanalytic theory.
Psychoanalytic Quarterly
For those who read this book, the study of human development will be entirely transformed. Not only is this book destined to be an authoritative reference for those who work with infants and children. but it also promises to radically restructure many of our current paradigms of infant/child development and care.
Contemporary Education
Allan Schore’s Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self is a brilliant, if not awesome, synthesis with supporting data from a spectrum of many disparate sources, including anatomic, developmental, neurochemical and psychodynamic. He has developed a coherent and integrated neuropsychological model of the location, development, and mechanism of the self.
International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine